I know a fair amount about technology and the Internet, at least compared to some people. However, I am not an expert on web analytics which is why I'm sharing this guest column by my friend and colleague, Gregg Gottschling of TheGiftCardCafe.com (pictured below).  By getting Gregg to write a guest column for me, not only am I educating my readers on a subject that is important to their businesses, I am also cross-promoting my business with someone else's (and getting a little time off from writing to boot!) This is guerrilla marketing in action and can be done in every business in some form or fashion.

Hope you like the article and take a look at what TheGiftCardCafe.com has to offer! Enjoy!

 Gregg Gottschling, The Gift Card Cafe

Good web analytics shows you how visitors actually find and use your site so that you can make informed decisions on how to make changes & improvements for your business.  How can analytics actually help your business?  Well for starters it can give you a baseline for how many people actually visit your site, but more importantly what they do and how they act once they are on the site.  Small Business owners need to learn how to treat their website as if it was an extension of their storefront, especially if you are selling products and services online. 

I referenced ‘Small Business Owners’ in particular, because if you were a large business, you would probably have a team of people doing it for you!  So you can look at ‘Analytics’ as being part of your team that you don’t have to pay a salary too!  Take this for example… If you set up a display of products in the back corner of you store your probably would have a hard time selling those products.  But if you move that same display of products to front of the store, where you know your customer will be passing by at a higher frequency, you will sell those products in no time at all! 

You might be saying to yourself, well who in their right mind would put a display in the back corner of their shop?  Common sense would tell you nobody and you’re probably correct!  But for some reason when it comes to the web… common sense doesn’t always apply!  That’s why we have to rely on tools like Analytics to show us the way.  

Now don’t get caught up in running report after report but changing nothing.  The purpose is to help you make improvements to your site. Here are a few key areas that I recommend focusing on to get you started:

• Look at your top Exit Pages or pages with the highest Bounce Rate. If you find that a high percentage of people are leaving your site on a specific page then take a hard look at that page to make sure it’s really serving its purpose.  Is it hard to navigate, does it not provide the expected information, or is it just hard to understand?  Make some changes and then monitor the bounce rate to see if it improves. 
• Look at your top Entry Pages. If you can identify the pages people visit the most on your site then you can make sure to promote your key products or services clearly on those pages. If you find that most people are finding their way to the ‘Services’  page of your site it makes sense to place a call to action on that page because the more people that see it the better your chances of conversions.

A call to action could be asking your online visitor to purchase an Instant Gift Certificate Online, schedule an Online Appointment, or even Sign-up for a Monthly News Letter.  By understanding just a few aspects of Analytics, you can improve the visibility of your ‘call to actions’ which will increase your conversion rates and revenue. Below is a sample report that shows exactly what is going on in a site.

There is a whole lot more you can do with website analytics…and the best part is that Google provides professional quality analytics tools for your site and it’s all FREE! Just sign-up at: www.google.com/analytics